The man behind Mitt Romney's poll questions

Neil Newhouse, Mitt Romney’s campaign pollster, suddenly finds himself in an unfamiliar place — out on a limb.

The survey-taker, who helped build Public Opinion Strategies into the largest Republican polling firm and has a solid reputation among operatives and colleagues, is growing increasingly vocal with reporters and Romney supporters in the campaign’s closing days about what he sees as examples of flawed public polling, and his sense of the race — particularly in Ohio — as basically even.

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Newhouse is not known for seeking attention, but through the course of the presidential campaign, his profile has risen. He has been part of some public state-of-the-race calls, and is a frequent fixture on calls and in conversations with Romney surrogates and donors, telling GOP elites in one discussion last week that a Quinnipiac University survey with The New York Times and CBS was “crap.” (Newhouse said he didn’t recall using that word.)

Having decamped from Washington to Boston to be part of the campaign last year, Newhouse has gotten comparatively less attention than some of Romney’s high command, but he’s attained more of a public — and defensive — posture in the race’s last stages than President Barack Obama’s pollster Joel Benenson.

On Wednesday, one of the two men will be called a genius, and the other called a goat, based on assumptions they made about turnout models, especially in the crucial state of Ohio.

This is hardly an academic debate over the nuances of polling science. The basic issue is whether Newhouse’s internal forecasts and assumptions about the composition of the 2012 electorate are correct versus the ones made by the Obama campaign, which have tended to look more like public polling. If Newhouse is right, the majority of public pollsters will have egg on their faces. If he’s wrong, there will be post-mortems questioning his take.

It is because of Newhouse’s strong reputation that many Republicans have believed his assertions that Democrats are misreading the math, and why members of Romney’s campaign have stayed positive even when things have seemed publicly to be slipping from reach.

“Neil Newhouse is probably the most respected GOP pollster in the country,” said Nick Everhart, president of the Delaware, Ohio-based Strategy Group for Media, who has worked with POS repeatedly. “I think under-appreciated or respected when he pushes back hard on the public polling especially in Ohio, is that I feel like without question there isn’t a pollster in this country ever who has conducted or taken as many polls as Neil has in the state of Ohio. He’s practically an Ohio-based strategist the amount of work he’s done here, so it’s very hard not to take his comments and critiques of the rest of the public survey data coming out of the state seriously.”

Readers' Comments (106)

Of the 77 states with at least three late polls, the winner was called correctly in 74 cases. (I exclude Missouri in 2000, where the polling average showed an exact tie.) There has been little tendency for the state polling averages to overrate either Democrats or Republicans, or either incumbents or challengers. The state polls also performed fairly well in two years, 1996 and 2000, when the national polls were somewhat off the mark.

President Obama has experienced a resurgence in the well-respected Pew poll of the national presidential election, building a 3-point lead as Tuesday approaches.

Obama pulled 50 percent of likely voters against Republican candidate Mitt Romney’s 47 percent, a 3-point bump for the president from Pew’s last poll a week ago, which showed the candidates tied at 47 percent.

I would be curious to know what he is telling Romney to his face. Anyone who has followed campaign process story's knows that there are poll results they tell the donors and supporters and poll numbers they tell the Candidate and Chief of Staff. They usually put it in concrete the Friday before the election and Romney sounded different on Friday and of course they moved into PA. I would think that if the results really looked like a Romney win he would be on top of the world instead. No one really knows the results but I will go out on a limb as well. Romney will win Colorado because Gary Johnson will siphon the pot smokers away from Obama. Romney will win New Hampshire because they feel taken for granted and during the 2008 primary voted for Hillary. He will win North Carolina because it was a miracle that Obama turned it blue last time and that isn't going to happen again. He will also win Florida because the elderly are so confused about Medicare they don't know up from down and Romney and Rubio took control early. Obama will win the rest and remain the President. The only real surprise will be Virginia. It is incredibly tight but every poll since the storm has favored Obama and the storm reminded Virginians that we need FEMA and big government when we need it. The military here went Obama last time and it will be tighter but they know that Obama is for Veterans and Romney is for Defenestration's Contractor employees so they are a wash with perhaps a few more wives voting Obama because they don't want more deployments in Iran. But the unspoken ugly part of the campaign are the evangicals who wont vote for a Mormon or the President because they think he is a Muslim. They will vote Virgil Goode. They are being told from the pulpit that voting for either Romney or Obama is a sin. (I live here and wish it wasn't true) so if Goose siphons off even 1 to 2 percent that would have voted Republican Obama wins Virginia and the race is over. On Tuesday night I will be looking at rural western Virginia to see how Goode is doing and that will be an early indicator because Romney needs really big numbers there to make up the difference in Northern Va and Richmond.

(( ‘We’re going to have that person arrested and prosecuted that did the video,” said Hillary Clinton. No, not the person who made the video saying that voting for Barack Obama is like losing your virginity to a really cool guy. I’ll get to that in a moment. But Secretary Clinton was talking about the fellow who made the supposedly Islamophobic video that supposedly set off the sacking of the Benghazi consulate. And, indeed, she did “have that person arrested.” By happy coincidence, his bail hearing has been set for three days after the election, by which time he will have served his purpose. These two videos — the Islamophobic one and the Obamosexual one — bookend the remarkable but wholly deserved collapse of the president’s reelection campaign.

You’ll recall that a near-month-long attempt to blame an obscure YouTube video for the murder of four Americans and the destruction of U.S. sovereign territory climaxed in the vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden’s bald assertion that the administration had been going on the best intelligence it had at the time. By then, it had been confirmed that there never had been any protest against the video, and that the Obama line that Benghazi had been a spontaneous movie review that just got a little out of hand was utterly false. The only remaining question was whether the administration had knowingly lied or was merely innocently stupid. The innocent-stupidity line became harder to maintain this week after Fox News obtained State Department e-mails revealing that shortly after 4 p.m. Eastern, less than a half hour after the assault in Benghazi began, the White House situation room knew the exact nature of it.

We also learned that, in those first moments of the attack, a request for military back-up was made by U.S. staff on the ground but was denied by Washington. It had planes and special forces less than 500 miles away in southern Italy — or about the same distance as Washington to Boston. They could have been there in less than two hours. Yet the commander-in-chief declined to give the order. So Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought all night against overwhelming odds, and died on a rooftop in a benighted jihadist hellhole while Obama retired early to rest up before his big Vegas campaign stop. “Within minutes of the first bullet being fired the White House knew these heroes would be slaughtered if immediate air support was denied,” said Ty Woods’s father, Charles. “In less than an hour, the perimeters could have been secured and American lives could have been saved. After seven hours fighting numerically superior forces, my son’s life was sacrificed because of the White House’s decision.”

Why would Obama and Biden do such a thing? Because to launch a military operation against an al-Qaeda affiliate on the anniversary of 9/11 would have exposed the hollowness of their boast through convention week and the days thereafter — that Osama was dead and al-Qaeda was finished. And so Ty Woods, Glen Doherty, Sean Smith, and Chris Stevens were left to die, and a decision taken to blame an entirely irrelevant video and, as Secretary Clinton threatened, “have that person arrested.” And, in the weeks that followed, the government of the United States lied to its own citizens as thoroughly and energetically as any totalitarian state, complete with the midnight knock on the door from not-so-secret policemen sent to haul the designated fall-guy into custody. This goes far beyond the instinctive secretiveness to which even democratic governments are prone. The Obama administration created a wholly fictional story line, and devoted its full resources to maintaining it. ... ))

I am truly sick of this mantra from the Right saying they are more enthused. Every Dem' I know is ENTHUSED!!!!! We have done phone banking, donated and done what ever we could to give our President four more years. Just because the Republicans are filled with so much hate, it does not make them more enthused. Anyone with a brain can see that they are not that crazy about Romney--they just hate Barack Obama. I don't know....could it have something to do with race?